That’s a huge increase from the opening of the 112th Congress in 2011 when only 44 senators were tweeting. Twitter also boasts 398 House members with accounts.

Raw numbers can be misleading where Twitter is concerned. The federal tech sphere alone is litteredwith rarely used Twitter accounts. The Senate’s story seems different, though.

A quick review of about 30 senators’ handles revealed no slackers. All of the senators -- or usually their staffs, of course -- are tweeting at least several times a week but, more importantly, a solid proportion of those tweets include content that would actually be valuable to people following the senators’ activities, such as links to legislation the lawmaker introduced, notes on committee work and alerts about media appearances.

The role of the legislative branch is very different from the executive, of course, and lends itself more easily to a steady stream of substantive tweets. Every senator casts numerous votes each week, while an agency can spend months formulating a single policy change. Lawmakers are, on the dotted line, only beholden to themselves and their constituents, while an executive branch official must take positions that jibe with agency and governmetnwide policy. It would be nice to see more federal executives following Congresses’ lead, though.

I didn’t review all senators’ accounts, so please point out in the comments if I’ve missed any laggards.

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Joseph Marks covers cybersecurity for Nextgov. He previously covered cybersecurity for Politico, intellectual property for Bloomberg BNA and federal litigation for Law360. He covered government technology for Nextgov during an earlier stint at the publication and began his career at Midwestern newspapers covering everything under the sun. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a master’s in international affairs from Georgetown University.

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